COMMENTARY : Sometimes, the Art of Sliding Can’t Be Learned From a Book

We could talk about Jimmy Johnson and Magic Johnson, the men leaving and coming back, coming back and leaving. Or we could talk about Steve Carlton proving it’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. There’s the senator from Maine who’d rather wear a baseball cap than a judge’s robe. We could talk about Cecil Fielder being too big to do what he does and Muggsy Bogues being too little.

Or we could thank Betty Ford for Pat Summerall and Mickey Mantle, the old heroes alive and, at last, glad of it.

The ball is juiced, some folks say, and it’s flying out of the ballpark in record numbers. We could talk about that: We could say that’ll end when the umpires make the strike zone bigger than a mail slot. So much to say.

But it will have to wait. We’re talking sliding this week. We have strawberries and noodles, broken cigars and mustardy hot dogs. We have Rick Dempsey as Babe Ruth. We’ll tell you how to build a sliding pit. And we have Michael Jordan doing the limbo, sort of, at home plate.

We begin with Pete Rose, forever famous in sliding annals for having explained his face this way: “If you’d slid head first for 20 years, you’d look like this, too.” We begin with a Rose strawberry, this in a spring long ago. Anyone who ever threw himself down on a gravelly infield knows about strawberries. They’re red, ripe and tender. As Rose cleaned grit from the strawberry atop his thigh, a man made this diagnosis:

“Ouchee-wawa.”

“It’s from noodles,” Rose said.

“Noodles?”

“Did it making a commercial for a Japanese noodle company,” Rose said. “Musta slid for an hour.”

We’re talking sliding, a fundamental act of baseball instinct, an act given full demonstration any time the 1980s Orioles had a long rain delay. Then catcher Rick Dempsey stuffed his uniform with towels until he took on a Ruthian silhouette, after which he circled the bases and flung himself head first on the tarpaulin, sliding through the rain.

Alex Hawkins, the old football flake, once said he knew what baseball’s trouble was:

“Nowadays, you don’t ever see a fella sliding into second base and breaking his cigar.”

Too bad he missed Gates Brown and the hot dogs. On August 7, 1968, Brown wasn’t in the Detroit lineup and so, always a hungry player, he sneaked from the dugout to the clubhouse and came back with two hot dogs slathered with mustard--only to be ordered by Manager Mayo Smith to pinch hit.

Brown’s solution to his problem--he couldn’t let the skipper see his snack--was to stuff the hot dogs in his jersey. As he would tell it: “I always wanted to get a hit every time I went to the plate. But this was one time I didn’t want to get a hit. I’ll be damned if I didn’t smack one in the gap and I had to slide into second--head first, no less. I was safe with a double. But when I stood up, I had mustard and ketchup and smashed hot dogs and buns all over me.

“The fielders took one look at me, turned their backs and damned near busted a gut laughing at me. My teammates in the dugout went crazy.” After fining Brown $100, Smith said, “What the hell were you doing eating on the bench in the first place?” Brown: “I decided to tell him the truth. I said, ‘I was hungry. Besides, where else can you eat a hot dog and have the best seat in the house?’ ”

Anyone talking about sliding needs to track down the textbook by Al Campanis in 1954, when he was a smart guy. A generation later Campanis became a dumb guy by trying to explain to Ted Koppel that some people didn’t have the, the, the, the necessities to manage a baseball team. It was in his smart days as the Brooklyn Dodgers’ director of player personnel--he found Roberto Clemente and Sandy Koufax--that Campanis wrote “The Dodgers’ Way to Play Baseball.”

Using 10 pages of text and illustrations, Campanis told readers everything about sliding. “Sliding is rapidly becoming a lost art,” he wrote. So he spelled out the fundamentals and explained drills necessary to reinforce a player’s instincts. Campanis even included instructions for the building of a sliding pit:

“A 16-foot square is excavated to a depth of three or four feet. This is filled with fine sand and some sawdust is sprinkled on top. A strap is anchored in the exact center of the pit, coming up through the sand. The base is attached to the strap so that there is some play to it. . . . A rake should be on hand during sliding practice as the sand and sawdust need smoothing out after a few slides have been made.”

Maybe Michael Jordan’s next investment in Birmingham should be material for the construction of a sliding pit. Here’s why.

Jordan reached base last week on an infield scratch, his specialty. From third, on a wild pitch, he headed for home. In this Information Age, we could see this drama unfold on ESPN. We could see the catcher’s throw to the pitcher covering. We could see Jordan coming into the picture from the left side. We waited to see him slide into home. What a fabulous moment this would be.

Er, no. Not exactly. Jordan needed to slide. He wanted to slide. He tried to slide. He just couldn’t slide. So he sort of stopped. And leaned backward, away from the tag, leaning backward until he lost his balance and touched the dirt.

And while he did all this, he let his feet go forward. They made little baby steps of an embarrassed nature. His embarrassed feet tippy-toed toward the plate while the rest of his body leaned backward.

“And Michael is called out,” ESPN’s Keith Olbermann said, “ . . . for TRAVELING.”